


Mercy Shall Follow Me

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-22
Updated: 2008-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:35:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1634285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Busman's Honeymoon: the morning after the morning on which there was a death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mercy Shall Follow Me

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Flourish

 

 

In the morning, Peter says, suddenly: "There is a higher court than the Assizes."

Harriet merely nods, and says nothing. There is a grit to the English criminal law, beneath the solemnity of its ritual. In its passing of its judgements, it brings down the weight of precedence and deliberative time. It is easy to forget. She wonders if executions are carried out on Sundays, and decides not. The Assizes is a criminal court and a country court, sitting where cattle low and church bells ring in the spires. Crutchley could never have died in the great length of the shadows they cast. 

The sun has come out this morning, wintry, and there is a letter for Harriet from the Dowager Duchess. It is an odd, frothy mixture of domestic help and cat-scratches, with concern for Peter writ large between the words, and a postscript entreating _and you must be kind and good to yourself as well, dear, dear girl_ , and Harriet reads it over twice and thinks how she can do that now, how she can do that on this morning after a morning on which there was a death. 

"I shan't meddle again," Peter says, in that insincere, babbling way he reserves for mere detective work. "Man is born to an abundance of trouble without my meddling as well."

"You shall," Harriet says, without the tinge of self-doubt lurking below her voice. "You know you shall."

"Shall I?" He's guarded, suddenly, and then the defences crack a little. "You know me well."

"Yes," she says, simply. 

"That damnable education of women rears its ugly head once more."

Hearing it against the backdrop of his current frame of mind, she looks up sharply, wondering in quick succession if his meaning was sincere and if she ought to be hurt, but there is a quick flash in his eyes, a transitory gleam of himself, and she curses herself inwardly, loud and long. Of course... of course he wouldn't say such a thing.

 _But it is telling, that you thought even for a moment that he might_ , observes the cool, clear-headed part of her that allows her to write fiction. It _is_ telling, and suddenly she is restless, claustrophobic in this house and its too recent ghosts. She gets up from the breakfast table very deliberately and holds out her hand to him. "Shall we go for a walk?" 

"A walk?" he repeats, staring at her hand as though the idea were unheard of and novel.

"Or a drive, if you'd prefer?"

"A walk. To clear one's head of that" -- he pauses, gives her the smallest of wry smiles -- "that darkest hour."

She loves him, she thinks, for that very lightest of light touches, that twisting and taking down of the night's horrors into words that do not frighten. "Do you believe it?" she asks him, when they are outside, amid the stirrings of a beautiful day. Birds call in the distance, and there are small chirrups from the undergrowth.

"Do I believe what? That the darkest hour is before the dawn? "

"Yes. And before you ask, I don't know myself. I don't think on it." 

"Do you not?" He sounds mildly, genuinely curious.

"Because I don't have to think on it," she says, still inwardly cursing. Because when my villains are caught and tried, they promptly disappear back into fairyland, dissolve back into the pen and ink whence they came.

He looks at her as though she had said what she were thinking and sighs, heavily. "You do think on it. You let me, in my tiresome way, take all the lack of self-control for myself."

"Peter..."

"You stand there and you wait for me to come to you, and I come, and forget whatever grief you might wish to lay at my feet."

"Peter," she says, sternly, nobly, thinking absurdly that she hopes the Dowager Duchess would be proud, "if you want to engage in self-flagellation, you could choose more fitting weather for it, at least."

He stares at her, and then is surprised into laughter. "Touche, my lady. It's a great shame that there's a distinct lack of pathetic fallacy in this old place. Lightning storms with lots of reverb, that sort of thing. Although I must say the night we arrived fitted the bill jolly well on all counts."

"Don't be ridiculous, Peter" -- but she's laughing a little, and is stupidly happy to see light returning dimly in the depths of his eyes.

"Your mother wrote to me this morning," she says, presently. "She's concerned about you, she's asking about your health."

He frowns. "I must write to her haste-post-haste, as the Bard would say, or she'll be agitatin' to come and visit and feed me chicken broth, and I'm not sure too much travel is good for her."

"She would be horrified to hear you say that," Harriet answers, privately planning to relay this remark to the Dowager Duchess. "Peter..." - and there is no way to go on that will not descend into the wifely and solicitous idiocy that she has been so assiduously avoiding, so she falls silent.

"What is it?" he asks, gently. She wishes he wouldn't be so gentle.

A pause, and then: "Peter, if I were in your place, I would drink chicken broth that Bunter served me, and I wouldn't worry too much about what people said, for now."

For a long time, Peter doesn't say anything. They continue their circuit of the dew-softened grass, but his expression remains unreadable, and Harriet is filled with the ghastly fear that perhaps he has finally taken this as sympathy, that cloying horror, and that too not from all people, not from fluttering media people, from her. _There was a death in my house too_ , she thinks, bleakly, and wishes for rain.

Peter stops walking, turns, still with those unreadable eyes, and says, "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for..."

He looks at her. She takes his hand, and they go on together. 

 


End file.
